


Strangelove Ocean

by kashinoha



Category: Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. (TV), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Alien!Coulson, Nick almost pisses himself, Phil is a giant dork, Tahiti, mental trauma, potty-prose warning
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-03-06
Updated: 2015-03-06
Packaged: 2018-03-16 12:59:48
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,023
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3489149
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kashinoha/pseuds/kashinoha
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A week after New York and he’s pretty sure he has slept less than Stark, nursing several bruises and a sore shoulder because people are talking about life on other planets and he is talking about the dead returning to life. </p><p>Or, in which Project TAHITI scares the daylights out of Nick Fury.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Strangelove Ocean

All characters © Marvel

 

On days when he is one quarter sober and three quarters full of whatever mumbo jumbo juice they sell at SHIELD’s Happy Hour, Nick likes to compare fear with the moon. It is rather poetic, giving he has had to forgo any sense of romanticism to the cold practicality of PR reports and four-terabyte hard drives that would make Steve Jobs weep inconsolably.

It’s all about how tightly you can or can’t hold onto your shit, in the end. Now the moon, the moon has its shit together. It never winks out just because it sees the sun coming. Fear is the same damn way. No harm in feeling it—means you actually _care_ —but you watch it, bright and unblinking in the darkness and never too involved. Otherwise you’ve got a damn mess in your pants and Nick does not have time to potty train the most covert espionage organization on the planet.

So yeah, you could say Nick Fury has never been one to scare easily.

 

 

Taking a psychological assessment at SHIELD is like taking Rorschach, Freud, Wechsler, and Myers-Briggs and trying to make goulash with them. A well-justified nightmare, and no one ever scores higher than a seven.

So when word gets around that one of the Level 1 operatives scores a 9.2 on his first psych eval, Nick is mildly curious. It’s 1982, half the new recruits not including him are already scared shitless of getting AIDS, and no one gets a 9.2.

To Nick’s mild disappointment, the guy with the 9.2 turns out to be some Average Joe with a prematurely receding hairline that makes his age impossible to pin down. But because his mild curiosity outweighs his mild disappointment, Nick watches him for a while and realizes the guy is a fuckin’ _robot._ Same suit every day, same slight smile, arrives at 7:10 _on the dot_ without fail.

Eventually, Nick’s mild curiosity about the Average Joe turns into moderate frustration.

“Man, why do you wear the same damn tie every day?” are his first words to the guy. A later decade might have prompted a _Men in Black_ or a _Matrix_ crack, but the fact that the suit does not even seem to _wrinkle_ bugs the ever-loving shit out him. It’s just not right.

Average Joe blinks, looks down at his front. He gives a shrug. “Saves me the trouble of having to choose in the morning,” he says.

“Yeah, well, I ought to spill a nice cup of coffee on it.”

“Why waste a good cappuccino?”

Nick snorts. “Have you _had_ the coffee here?” Shaking his head, he says, “Well, if it ends up on your tie it’d be a nice color change from that boring-ass blue.”

The guy gives a strange little smile-frown, brow furrowing like he’s squinting into the sun, and replies, “It’s actually cerulean.” Nick stares. Average Joe is either incredibly oblivious or a genius or just a giant dork, and at the moment Nick cannot tell which one it is. Then the frown is gone and all that is left is the smile—a 9.2 kind of smile, and the guy holds out his hand.

“Call me Phil,” he says.

 

 

“You ever think about being a part of something bigger?”

Phil raises his eyebrows. He is sitting at his station, shuffling a set of old Captain America cards between his fingers. “Is this about the AIDS thing?” he asks.

“Nah,” says Nick, shaking his head. “I’m just saying you haven’t been back a week and you’re cooler than a cucumber. Which means if you ever thought about moving higher you definitely got the _cojones_ for it.”

It’s true. The Sausalito snafu was an embarrassment to all covert ops alike, yet somehow Phil is the most relaxed Nick has ever seen him. For Phil, that simply means his legs are uncrossed and his Windsor knot is loosened almost a full inch. Even after a year he is wearing that same infernal tie which he still insists is cerulean. Nick has always assumed Phil a little colorblind.

“What can I say?” Phil says, shrugging. “Sausalito had good coffee.”

Nick raises an eyebrow. “And no extraction plan.”

“Yeah, we should really talk to somebody about having those for all the operatives. It might be nice,” says Phil, smiling. Everything about Phil is good-natured, even his sarcasm.

“I bet May would like that,” Nick chuckles. “Is it true she made one of the board members cry during your debriefing?”

“I wouldn’t talk about her here,” Phil says with a glance at the door, eyes narrowed. “She’s bugged all the rooms on this level, you know.”

Nick’s eyelid jitters. “Again?” He blows out his breath in a sigh. “That woman is one scary tiger lady, let me tell you.”

“No fear, right?”

Nick leans back in his chair and the cushions let out a wheeze of protest. “You know what, Phil? Fuck fear.”

“Indeed,” says Phil with a somber nod. There are no windows on this level, but the little vintage analog on his desk reads 8:30. Nick remembers that tonight will be a full moon.

“If we are still alive by the time we’re fifty,” he asks Phil, “you got a retirement plan?”

“Hmm,” Phil thinks, tapping his bottom lip. “I think I’ll go to Tahiti.”

Nick laughs. “Nothing scary there, man,” he says.

 

 

 His hazelnut roast goes down the wrong pipe one morning in January and Nick has to do his best not to dribble like an idiot as he coughs it out. He stares because something is very, very wrong and a little nagging voice in the back of his head tells him he should be frightened.

“Well?” says Phil, standing in front of his desk with that hopeful Puppy Face that makes people want to give him cookies (see, last week) and shit.

“It’s,” Nick manages, “different.”

Phil rolls his eyes. “I was going for lucky,” he says, holding up the tie. “I don’t think yellow is really my color, but I’m willing to give it a try.”

“Anyone in a mile radius can spot that tie, and you call it lucky?” asks Nick, putting a hand on one hip. Phil shrugs, smoothes the tie down, and replies, “Who knows? I feel good.”

Phil is not the superstitious type, but that had been the day he and May left for Bahrain and Nick never saw that tie again.

 

 

A month after Pierce joins the World Security Council he calls Nick in to be evaluated by the Strategic Homeland BOT. Nick walks in with his best leather jacket, looks calmly at them, and proceeds to tear apart their security files one badly-written sentence after another. He gets the Director’s position on the spot and his first thought is that he can finally fix the damn coffee machine.

The interview had been pie, but running SHIELD is scarier than anything he has ever done. He’s taken a grenade to the eye and faced the Hulk with nothing but a My Little Pony doll and hell, he should know a thing or two about fear.

Then Phil dies.

 

 

TAHITI has always been a crapshoot, at least to Nick. You don’t just _put_ alien DNA into people, even if that alien has the stem cell capabilities of a juiced-up axolotl. But Phil had been adamant that it could cure cancer, disease, dismemberment, and with that lighting his face up like the sun Nick just could not say no.

So Nick does something that would roll his mama who’d gone to church every Sunday morning over in her grave like a rotisserie chicken. He opens the GH cooler and realizes something so terrible his stomach gives a heave and he has to swallow hard against bile.

Phil’s tie had not been “cerulean” after all. No, that shade of blue, to Nick’s horror, had been Kree.

 

 

A week after New York and he’s pretty sure he has slept less than Stark, nursing several bruises and a sore shoulder because people are talking about life on other planets and he is talking about the dead returning to life.

Howard had been a genius at covering up Roswell back in ’47, but explaining the Chitauri is something that makes today’s SHIELD squirm in their expensive leather chairs. They have known about the Kree since ’45 and Asgard since 2011, but the timing is just never right to say, “Hey guys, so the thing is there actually is life on other planets.” You know how it goes.

Breaking it to the press has never been more awkward, and Nick gets a lot of flack for leaving that stuff to his subordinates. Coward, some call him. But that’s not quite right. Nick just has bigger shit to deal with—yes, bigger than the obliteration of downtown Manhattan.

Nick is so sore. He never thought losing a friend would _hurt._

He lands somewhere in the Rockies, temple pulsing with his sixth cup of coffee that day because Phil comes back wrong and he has to do something about that. Something that he probably will not enjoy.

Most of the nurses working on TAHITI look pale and ill, like they will be sick at any moment. Even Doctor Goodman, who Nick remembers handling TAHITI’s first batch beautifully, looks shaken. She takes him to the containment chambers and explains (reads, warns) that sometimes the mind cannot cope with rebooting on such a colossal scale. Because it’s often easier to tell people to shut the hell up without actually saying anything, Nick shoots his one eye on her and she takes the hint, looking grateful.

Over the years he has witnessed more types of mind control and possession than he’s able to count. When he walks in on Coulson, however, Nick almost turns around and walks right back out. This is nothing like any of those, and it’s then Nick realizes that all the work they have put into this project means nothing in the end. Because Phil is not back, not really.

“He may not recognize you, Director,” says Goodman.

It is more like someone took everything that made Phil _Phil_ out and stuffed something back in that was trying to be Phil. Only it isn’t quite working. It is off and sour and it is _wrong,_ like a house that is all skewed angles and warped perspectives because you do not yet realize you are dreaming it. In Nick’s mind, Phil is always a forty-something guy with an immaculate blue tie and twinkling eyes. A guy with a fondness for old-new things, Bach, and Windsor knots. The man on the hospital cot is sharper, thinner. Nick notices fewer lines on his face, the pewter flecks in his hair gone, but the crow’s feet around his eyes have been replaced by dark circles and bloodsnapped whites.

And Nick really does not like the way Phil is looking at him now. Phil has his head tilted to the side and his chin jutted out and goddamn he’s not even blinking. There are handcuffs on the bed.

“Agent Coulson,” Nick addresses him, “do you know where you are?”

Phil offers a sated grin. “No one is home at the Guest House,” he says. His voice sounds far away, too high, or maybe that is the rushing in Nick’s ears. The room is cold but Nick feels damp patches of sweat under his arms and the air suddenly tastes thick and metallic.

“I…don’t need to remind you that anything that happens here is confidential,” he tells Goodman and the nurse, who nod. He points to some healing scabs behind Phil’s ears. “What are those?” Nick asks, his voice low.

“The hypergraphia was a problem,” explains Goodman, swallowing. “He tried to, well—“

“I need to go,” Phil interrupts from the cot. For a minute he sounds perfectly reasonable and Nick half expects him to talk about the weather or Lola or Stark’s extravagant budgeting. “Back there.”

“He keeps saying that,” the nurse mutters. “We don’t know what it means.”

Nick scowls. “Get me a full medical report, and I want Streiten on this,” he snaps. He knows what TAHITI does. They had brought back people teetering along death’s tightrope but still alive, and just that act alone had driven them mad. Graphically.

They have never injected someone dead for three days, stiff with rigor mortis.

“Back there,” Phil says again, more urgent. His fingers are twirling circle-line patterns on his lap and his tongue is lolling out over his bottom lip and it is then that Nick realizes that he does not have his shit together. It’s not Phil at all. He’s fucking terrified.

Fear works in strange ways, he thinks. Selective, targeting the cracks beneath your doors. To digress, Nick remembers the summer of ’77, New York City, the Son of Sam murders and the city-wide blackout; reading about Charles Xavier on the case running into the Winter Soldier by chance and seeing nothing inside. “The Empty Man,” Xavier had called him, and for that guy to look into someone’s head and not like what he sees makes Nick want to boil the KGB in a vat of bubbling oil. But that is beside the point.

Johnny Storm screamed for two days straight after a retrieval op in the Congo. Wade Wilson, serious for once in his life, had a massive panic attack when Doom leaked the formula for a new type of cancer. Nick has seen them all afraid in the dark. Even Pierce has had his own mindfuckery at the hands of Jason Striker, but that’s something no one talks about if they want to keep their jobs and next of kin.

Nick himself grew up in the rusted butter-greased back alleys of Hell’s Kitchen and had beat up his first bully at six. Beat up a cop at sixteen. Joined the army and became a Colonel so he could beat up people during office hours, went to Budapest, saw shit go down that would make the Leviathan training camps look like daycare.

This is scarier than them all.

“I’m Nobody. Nobody’s home!” exclaims the Not-Phil with a giggle, pointing to Nick’s eye patch. He rolls his head toward Goodman, whose face is the ashen grey of old bone in the winter, and pleads, “Why won’t you let me back to the magical place?”

“I think I’ve seen enough,” Nick grits out between tightly closed teeth, and shuts his good eye so he would not have to look at the Not-Phil, the Not-Coulson. The _Odyssey_ has never been so chilling, not because Phil has alluded to it but because Nick knows that Phil has never _read_ The _Odyssey_ and it’s getting harder to swallow.

“Go back, go back, go back—“

Goodman nods, also looking away from the cot. She explains, “Injecting the GH-325 serum into someone who was already dead seems to have exacerbated the symptoms of—“

“Oh my god,” the nurse warbles. Nick turns around and Phil’s hands are a blur on the sheets, gesturing out symbols, but it is his voice that makes Nick’s blood freeze. It is not English nor any Earth language Nick can recognize and just the sound of it makes his whole body seize in a shiver. The nurse turns and promptly flees the room. Nick ought to fire him, but another part of him cannot honestly blame the nurse. Everything inside his own body is screaming at him to run away, out of this mountain, out of this _state_ because watching whatever is on that cot is something Nick had not been prepared for.

Doctor Goodman curses and lunges for the cuffs. The Not-Phil is laughing as the she tries to snap the cuffs around his wrists. “Where’s the damn sedative?” Nick shouts over the Not-Phil.

She grunts. “We’ve—“she misses and the right cuff clangs against the bedpost—“used it all!”

Nick’s not even in the mood to make a quip on how the fuck that is possible and instead helps Goodman chain Phil to the bed. By the end of it all three of them are panting, and the Not-Phil is crying. Maybe. He can already see a spot on Goodman’s arm starting to bruise, and that does it.

Nick whirls on her. “Fix this,” he hisses, before storming out in a billow of coal-black overcoat. His hands do not stop shaking until he is halfway to DC and he breathes in and out, tries to think of the moon.

 

 

Things are back to normal now.

Well, sort of. Nick has joined Phil on the “empty coffins in the cemetery” list, alongside Steve Rogers, Bucky Barnes, Michael Peterson, and Mary Sue Poots. He tells himself he does not enjoy playing the American government nearly as much as Stark does, but he isn’t going to deny the humor in Talbot’s moustache wiggling up and down as he attempts to explain things.

Phil has a team, Melinda May re-learns how to smile, and Hydra has them all sniffing for serpent’s blood. Just another day at the office. Nick visits (more like pops up cryptically) on occasion, and sees that Phil has changed his tie to a soft, navy blue with white stripes.

Phil looks at him with that tie and that same old 9.2 smile and sometimes, just sometimes, there is something in his eyes that unsettles Nick. Phil has always had his shit together, but now sometimes he doesn’t, even if he cannot remember why.

On cloudy nights, Nick sips bad coffee from a chipped SHIELD mug and wonders if maybe the fallen are meant to stay down.

Then the clouds shift, the moon slides out, and once in a while Phil calls him on his personal line to complain about a scratch on Lola’s hood or May stealing his Spider Man cappuccino mug and Nick wants to both hug and murder him at the same time.

On those nights he hangs up feeling a little better. He looks up at the velvet sky and is sure the moon will stay out ‘till morning. Sun be damned.

 

_End._

 

**Author's Note:**

> Getting over a massive writer's block, decided to write for Nick Fury because he's one badass motherfucker and a good excuse to add some spotty language. Enjoy!


End file.
